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Parisian Worldcon Bid

Is this a job for Hercule Poirot or Inspector Clouseau? A mysterious someone has created a Paris in 2019 bid page — https://sites.google.com/site/parisin2019/. Who? Is there anything more to the bid than an address on the Internet?

Maybe. Chaz Boston-Baden hasn’t listed it among the hoaxes at Worldcon.org/bids/. Of course, the Boston in 2020 Christmas Worldcon Bid is classified as a real bid, too, so perhaps all that’s required is for a fan to want someone to hold the 2019 Worldcon in Paris.

Update 03/17/2013: Chaz Boston-Baden sent me a copy of the announcement he received — “We wish to inform you that a fledgling bid for Paris to host the 77th World Science Fiction Convention in 2019 has been born. We plan to officially launch the bid next year at Loncon3 in London.” It came from a Parisin2019 Gmail account.

Morris – wasn’t saying it was real or a fake, just noting that they have claimed space on those platforms. I contacted the group via their Facebook page asking about the bid and received this response.

“Hi Meg,

Paris in 2019 is in it’s very early stages and is a speculative bid at the moment being organised by a small number of French and UK fans.
Our team is in the process of trying to bring more French fans on board at the moment.
Our last wish is for a bunch of UK fans to run a ‘British’ style Worldcon in France without the help of local French fans.

One of the venues we have been in initial discussions with have a very full calendar of events to the point where they often turn away possible clients.
Therefore the date of 2019 has been selected which should give us enough time to put together a good bid.

One of our team will be chatting to other UK fans at Eastercon this year to start to raise awareness of the bid and to seek expertise
from past UK Worldcon committee members and to invite them to a site visit in France to see if the venue we have initially selected as a possible venue is truly feasible to host a Worldcon.